Snippets of the Hunt for Weird

February 26, 2010

Dear Diary:

Today encountered 77th supposedly classic iteration of the formula in which, on the very last page, the supernatural makes its entrance on the wings of the following:

“Why, I was delighted to meet and have a splendid conversation with your mother/ father/ wife/ son/ daughter/ brother/ sister/ gardener/ plumber/ consierge/ frog the other day in that little abandoned room far from all the light fixtures!”

You have to GO DOWN THERE, if you don’t GO DOWN THERE, there’s no denouement! DON’T YOU WANT TO BE RESOLVED?

PS: I resent this post, as I’ve fairly recently “done this one” with a chicken (http://www.greenpunk.net/?p=76), but now I see I could have substituted just about anything and the story would not have changed . . . however, I think we could, ah, better discuss the revelation of this tired plot structure if you could just COME DOWN HERE, Jeff. That’s it, watch that first step. Go ahead, it’s perfectly safe DOWN THERE.

We have found some interesting crab stories in some Tartarus editions.

I’m afraid the staid ghost story isn’t finding much traction with us. We’re tending to define “weird” as more in your face than that but less pulpy, too. There’s an interesting intersection of stories from “literary” and “pulp” sources that display true originality and strangeness, with just the right amount of life, drama, imagination, etc.

Heh. It’s just interesting how it’s playing out. There’s a “know it when we see it” kind of thing going on, and then a more formal “these are the common themes/approaches we’re seeing”. It’s the opposite of taking a position or creating a thesis and then finding things that fit. We’re examining all of the evidence and letting it dictate, which is a longer and more grueling process but should result in a better process.

One thing I have to say from our most recent reading: Caitlin R. Kiernan has produced some of the best weird fiction of the last 20 years, and it’s going to be a bear getting it down to just one story to represent that.

In reading for a book of old stories that I was proposing to a certain publisher, I also found that about 20 percent had the same plot line. Which is convenient, because usually you can just trash them right away. Occassionaly however, despite a bad plot line, the writing is so good that it is worth reading. The only ghost stories I have ever truly enjoyed however are those by Algernon Blackwood and Oliver Onions.

Ha! Julie, now I want to write a ghost frog story. I did have a kind-of ghost frog in the form of a Bloat Toad in my Vance story in that Songs from the Dying Earth antho, but it’s not really the same thing.

Ghost frogs leave no sign of their presence. Ghost frogs exist in five dimensions at once and this is why they are so still. It takes so much concentration to exist in so many places simultaneously. But this doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking.

Ghost frogs have enormous eyes, eyes that are as large as their entire bodies, because they are looking so intently at the spirit world, and the more spirits they see the larger their eyes become. Eventually, their eyes grow so large and filled with spirit-sightings that they become like balloons and the ghost frogs float up to the spirit-world, their tiny bodies dangling below, gaze fixed on that which they will soon become part of.

Ghost frogs form the firmament of heaven. You tread upon their eyes, but it feels like you’re walking on large, firm bubbles. And yet always the ground is watching you. You can do nothing in heaven without a ghost frog knowing about it.

If you’re talking about the honeygrass soda drink with what tastes like tadpoles at the bottom, I agree!

Erm, it now appears the Ghost Frawg fragments will be ingested by my monstrous story Komodo. Komodos travel through all of the altworlds by means of the chemical in their poison glands. But they need sentinels at the portals…and for that they need the ghost frogs.

With multiforked eye-tongue-eyes?
You are setting up quite a challenge for the illustrator.
This frogs would have made Lovecraft queasy.
But please write it.
I can’t wait to hear about their frog poetry.

There’s no poetry for the ghost frogs. But they are forever in mental contact with their many ghost tadpoles, and the gathering of the lines of inquiry from the tadpoles to the ghost frog form an incoming stream that’s like a continual recitation of a constantly changing sestina.

About Jeff VanderMeer

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer has been named the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence for Hobart-William Smith College. His most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) from FSG, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. The trilogy also prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau” and has been acquired by publishers in 28 other countries, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the movie rights. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, Vulture, Esquire.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference, lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp . His forthcoming novel from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled Borne. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer. You can contact him at pressinfo at vandermeercreative.com. (Author photo by Kyle Cassidy.) More...